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SJWs, “Gaslighted” By Common Sense

Although 99.9% of articles written by (and for) social justice crusaders are off this planet, some manage to take reason into an even deeper black hole, never to be recovered again.

This is one of them. “Six unhelpful comments that gaslight people in conversations about social justice.” Leaving aside the nonsensical notion of unintentional gaslighting, which appears later in the article, the piece proves beyond doubt that SJWs are allergic to debate and to being questioned.

This would be a summary:

The result of this repeated questioning and doubting is that people start feeling like their observations of their oppression are wrong, they don’t have the right to talk about it, and it’s not real. (…)

Even if it feels like you’re just playing the devil’s advocate, providing food for thought, or helping people understand the other side, what seems like friendly debate to you can be deeply hurtful to someone else.

So, instead of invalidating someone’s experiences, thank them for teaching you. That can take a lot of mental and emotional energy.

And let them know you believe them. That’s something people who talk about their oppression unfortunately don’t hear enough.

That’s right. If anybody claims oppression, it must be real and your duty is to believe every word they say, in spite of any objection your brain matter or instincts might raise.

What seems like a friendly debate to you could just be a callous put-down and mockery, able to cause someone actual trauma. You’re so stupid you have no awareness of your own tone, vocabulary and manners; you can’t possibly determine the dynamics of this discussion with the judgement you use in your everyday life.

So you’d better shut up and thank them for teaching you, like the brainwashed little cultist that you are, because they are correct by default and whatever they say goes.

“This is a first world problem”

“How can you talk about microaggressions when girls in the Middle East are killed for trying to get an education?”

“Eating disorders are a first-world problem. Some people don’t even have food.”

This argument frequently comes up when people talk about issues faced by relatively privileged groups. It can have racist undertones, since the people with “real problems” are often from a different culture that the speaker doesn’t really understand.

There’s nothing racist about mentioning human rights abuses and the barbaric treatment some people face in other parts of the world. A different culture that the speaker doesn’t really understand can be subject to criticism regardless. I don’t need to “understand” why women are being stoned to death in order to know it’s horrific and undeserved. But for lack of better arguments, let’s just throw racism in to shut people up.

There is no logical comparison between eating disorders, which can cause serious health problems or even death, and are proper medical conditions, and the perceived microaggressions which twist a word or look or any minutia into a serious act of oppression.

Since we’re on this subject, here are a few relevant headlines from the same website, covering “issues” I’m sure would never occur to anyone with a real disadvantage in life (I’m not putting even more of their links here but you can find them by using the search bar):

“Why these toys need a body image make-over”

“Where are you from? How a seemingly innocent question is racist”

“5 ways to avoid sexism in your kid’s Halloween costumes”

“How to explore your gender when you’re a person who was assigned male at birth”

Adding to that numerous exposes of how you oppress others by eating foreign dishes without knowing the culture you’re “borrowing” from and so forth. These “problems” are not only demoted by tragedies from abroad but also by any other real issue anyone can come across.

It’s also dangerous because it implies that we should be grateful for being less oppressed than some people, rather than demand not to be oppressed at all.

No, it’s simply stating a fact. Prioritisation is a matter of mere logic. You don’t scream for medical attention for a scratch while someone next to you needs CPR. Whatever these middle class feminists claim to be enduring is not nearly as serious as facing beatings, maimings, executions or imprisonment for idiotic reasons. That is fact and mentioning it, whilst uncomfortable, is no less true.

As a woman, a person of color, or another member of an oppressed group, it’s easy to feel lucky when a man doesn’t rape you or a white person listens to you or anyone treats you like a human being.

This almost sounds like people of colour are being treated awfully in the western world, which is generally multicultural and has been for decades (if not centuries in some places) as to be grateful “when a white person listens to them”. It’s easy to feel lucky when a man doesn’t rape you? Do you expect every man to potentially do so, every day?

But as Susan B. Antony said, “Our [j]ob is not to make young women grateful. It is to make them ungrateful so they keep going. Gratitude never radicalized anybody.”

Pardon me again but since when is radicalisation anything to aspire to, as opposed to measured and rational thinking? What good has ever come out of extremism lately? Or ever?

Knowing that some people get third-degree burns doesn’t make first-degree burns hurt less. And bringing up more severe injuries is totally inappropriate when someone needs medical attention.

When is a crucial word here. Fortunately, no medical attention is needed by these activists – although some people might disagree! – but simply attention. Turning every displeasure into an injury to your psyche is not in itself healthy.

“We all bleed the same color”

Feminism and other social justice movements are sometimes accused of being divisive, as if the divisions they’re calling attention to didn’t already exist. (…)

But here’s the thing: For a long time, people haven’t acknowledged that we’re all human and that commonalities between groups are stronger than the differences. And as a consequence, different groups of people have different experiences.

For a long time. Human history has indeed been long, filled with bloodshed and intolerance. But by and large, they do acknowledge that now – so why the hell sabotage that concept, so long fought for? Why emphasise the differences when at last there is a better way on the horizon? What makes SJWs better – or different – than the average skinhead, who is obsessed with these differences and cannot look past them?

Once, a man told me he understood what it was like to self-objectify because he often worried about how professional he looked. When I tried to explain that I was talking about something entirely different, he claimed that we’re all humans, so we should be able to understand one another’s emotions.

“Pain is pain,” his friend agreed.

But there are many different kinds of pain. And if it seems to you like a distinct form of pain someone else describes does not actually exist, maybe that’s because you’re too privileged to have experienced it.

The last paragraph is a fine example of projection. The man in question was not refusing to acknowledge the author’s experience but merely adding to the conversation by describing his own, albeit different. The author could not stand the focus being shifted or someone perceiving these internal struggles as similar.

I have a question – why insist on describing an experience or a feeling to someone you think is incapable of relating to it? It seems attempts to understand it by comparison are met with a door slammed in the face. It’s like saying you will never ever understand me, so just shut up and listen to me instead, just for the sake of it; any comments you make should be a direct recitation from my words; anything else is unacceptable.

“Don’t let it get to you”

But even if we were all robots who could decide not to mind when others mistreated us, that wouldn’t change the fact that they were mistreating us. It would just make us really good at handling mistreatment.

Sorry to be the bringer of bad news when real (but not systemic) mistreatment is involved: you will never change an asshole. What you can do is get away from them and find a different environment. There is no way to escape nastiness completely, unless you live in self-imposed isolation. Assholes will be assholes and no amount of coercion to behave differently will have an impact on them (aside from making them covert and devious, which also makes them more dangerous). The only impact the PC brigade is having is on innocent people targeted for unintended trifles or differences of opinion, such as opposing this trend.

Political correctness is really just being a good person. By making it sound like some formal code of conduct, people demonize basic efforts to make others feel comfortable and included.

To members of a privileged group, expectations like using gender-inclusive language and avoiding ableist expressions can feel like arbitrary rules. But for the people personally affected by political incorrectness, this behavior makes a huge difference.

Sorry to be a bad person, but you’re not going to shove down my throat language which was literally invented yesterday to please groups of the same recent formation, of which some are merely trends. I’m not going to learn a whole dictionary of 300 gender identities, 20 preferred pronouns and 50 different types of sexual preferences. You’re not going to turn my entire life into a tireless, neurotic attempt to not offend anyone around me, which is impossible anyway.

Even if we don’t fully understand how certain ways of speaking or acting affect groups we don’t belong to, it takes very little out of us when we accommodate them, while it takes a lot out of them when we don’t.

To those who have lost their jobs or have been fined or imprisoned for not being PC, I believe this is a far more serious and dangerous matter than just “being nice”. And when something is demanded in such a radical, poisonous and intolerant way, you can be sure that most will either reject it or claim to embrace it out of fear, which will in turn cause seething hatred for the groups making these demands, whether they are at fault or simply being used by Marxist radicals. Either way, nothing good comes out of it. I doubt those people would rather be secretly hated or feared than hearing the “wrong pronouns” beings used when others refer to them.

Political correctness gets capable people fired, gets innocent people treated as criminals and puts society into a state of paranoia. No brain. Next.

But sometimes, we’re not trying to attract positivity into our lives. Social injustice isn’t about individual lives. And we won’t get rid of it by doing yoga or taking baths or doing whatever people suggest with this advice.

Being positive doesn’t help when there are issues that need addressing.

Nope. Being negative every second of your life, about everything you or others experience, is entirely healthy and realistic; so is the goal of not resting until you solve every problem on this planet, down to petty nastiness, real or imagined (irony intended).

Maybe the rest of society just doesn’t want to become this.

Maybe others do care about their own wellbeing, refuse to soak themselves in your constant negativity and aggressiveness.

It’s funny how SJWs (feminists in particular) always extrapolate their feelings to exemplify worldwide issues, and then claim their fight is not about individual lives but something far greater. When their grievances are related to very personal experiences and all of a sudden they are forms oppression many are suffering from daily.

We’re allowed to feel what we feel, and we shouldn’t have to hide or mute our feelings just to reward someone for meaning well.

You don’t have to reward anyone. But you can leave them the hell alone.

On that note, people who say these things don’t always intend to gaslight. They’re often just operating off a false idea of what the other person wants.

No rational person knows what social justice warriors actually want. One day they complain about racism, the next day they invent cultural appropriation to make sure groups become voluntarily segregated. One day they claim they are vulnerable, the next day they complain others are treating them as weak and thus disrespecting them. One day they want “allies”, the next day they turn on them for “benevolent” this-and-that, when they get the unnatural praises they had asked for.